Arbus Reconsidered

By ARTHUR LUBOW
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14
With a landmark museum show on Diane Arbus and the first glimpse
of her revealing letters, an image of the photographer as a deeply
empathetic artist is coming into focus.
iving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a
baby,'' Norman Mailer said after seeing how she had captured him,
leaning back in a velvet armchair with his legs splayed cockily. The
quip was funny, but a little off base. A camera for Arbus was like a
latchkey. With one around her neck, she could open almost any
door. Fearless, tenacious, vulnerable -- the combination conquered
resistance. In an eye-opening sequence in ''Revelations,'' the
compendious new book that is being published in tandem with a fullscale retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, you
discover with a start the behind-the-scenes drama that produced her
famous photograph of ''A Naked Man Being a Woman.'' As her title
indicates, it is a portrait of a young man standing naked in his
apartment, genitals tucked out of sight, in a Venus-on-the-half-shell
pose. First she photographed him as a bouffant-haired young
matron on a park bench; then at home in a bra and half slip;
unwigged and unclothed a few moments later, with legs demurely
crossed; up posing for the prized shot; and finally, as a seemingly
ordinary fellow back on a park bench. Somehow, she had persuaded
him to take her home and expose a secret life. It's what she did
again and again. ''She got herself to go up to people on the street
and ask if she could photograph them,'' recalls her former husband,
Allan Arbus. ''One thing she often said was, 'I'm just practicing.''' He
chuckles. ''And indeed, I guess she was.''
During her lifetime, Arbus was lionized, but she was also lambasted
for being exploitative. Her suicide in 1971 seemed to corroborate the
caricature of her as a freaky ghoul. The critic Susan Sontag divined
that Arbus photographed ''people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well
as repulsive,'' from a vantage point ''based on distance, on privilege,
on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other.''
Patricia Bosworth's biography in 1984 took the suicide as an

emblem of the life and told a lurid tale that is neatly summarized by
the tag line on the paperback edition: ''HER CAMERA WAS THE
WINDOW TO A TORTURED SOUL.'' In The New York Review of
Books, Jonathan Lieberson eviscerated Bosworth's book but also
deprecated Arbus's pictures as ''mannered, static snapshots'' that
were ''chaste, icy, stylized.'' Chaste, icy, stylized? Arbus's friend
Richard Avedon, maybe. Not Diane Arbus.
Doon Arbus was 26 when Diane died. As the older daughter of a
divorced mother, she took on the responsibility of managing the
estate. Her response to the critics was to clamp the spigot shut.
Arbus's letters, journals and diaries could not be examined. Anyone
wishing to reproduce Arbus photographs would have to submit the
book or article for Doon's vetting; any museum contemplating a
retrospective had to enlist her active collaboration. In almost all
cases, permission was denied. Unsurprisingly, critics and scholars
fumed. As Anthony W. Lee, the co-author of a new academic
treatise, ''Diane Arbus: Family Albums,'' puts it in an acid footnote,
''Those familiar with the writings on Arbus's photographs will
recognize a common thread that joins them all, which this essay
also shares: nearly all are published without the benefit of
reproductions of some of her most famous work.'' That work now
appeared in three handsome, meticulous monographs, which over
the last three decades Doon has compiled and released.
So it comes as a shock to see -- in the first full-scale museum
retrospective since 1972 and in the book -- that Diane Arbus at long
last is presented whole. Together with the pictures that have become
icons (the Jewish giant and his bewildered parents, the disturbingly
different identical twins, the in-process transvestite in hair curlers,
etc.), there are many of her photographs that have never been seen
(or even, in some cases, printed). Better still, there is a rich
assortment of extracts from her letters and journals that reveal her to
be a quirky, funny, first-rate writer, an extraordinarily loving mother
and an empathetic observer of her photographic subjects. More than
30 years after her death, a new portrait is emerging of one of the
most powerful American artists of the 20th century, in the style that
she favored. Uncropped.
Allan, who is now a trim and graceful white-haired man of 85, gave
Diane her first camera soon after they married in 1941. She was 18,
and they had met five years earlier, when he started working at

Russek's department store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the fur

and clothing emporium founded by her grandfather and run by her
father, David Nemerov. Diane was the second of three children (her
older brother, Howard, became a prize-winning poet). She was
named for a character in a play her mother enjoyed; as with her
fictional namesake, it was pronounced ''Dee-ann.'' During Diane's
childhood, the Nemerovs lived in large apartments on Central Park
West and on Park Avenue. ''The family fortune always seemed to
me humiliating,'' she told the journalist Studs Terkel. ''It was like
being a princess in some loathsome movie'' set in ''some kind of
Transylvanian obscure Middle European country.'' The public rooms
were filled with reproduction French furniture in slipcovers. In the
Nemerovs' home life, as in their ritzy clothing store, everything was
for show.
Diane attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in the leafy
Riverdale section of the Bronx, where the student body was
composed largely of the children of affluent, liberal Jews. In art
class, her renderings stood apart. ''She would look at a model and
draw what none of us saw,'' recalls her classmate, the screenwriter
Stewart Stern. Yet she mistrusted her facility with a paintbrush. ''As
soon as she finished something, she'd show it and they'd say, 'Oh,
Diane, it's marvelous, it's marvelous,''' Allan recounts. Diane told
Terkel that praise of that sort ''made me feel shaky.'' Her father
enlisted the Russek's fashion illustrator to give her lessons, but
Diane lost interest in painting, perhaps because it was easy for her.
''I had a sense that if I were terrific at it, it wasn't worth doing, and I
had no real sense of wanting to do it,'' she said.
She felt otherwise about the Graflex, a smaller version of the classic
newsman's camera, that she received from Allan. Photography
suited her. She had a sharp eye. ''We once visited a cousin of mine,''
Allan recalls. ''He had a large bookcase, which extended -- '' He
indicates a span of 8 or 10 feet. ''We sat on a couch opposite the
bookcase. Some weeks later, we visited him again, and Diane said,
'Oh, you have a new book.''' The newlyweds would study
photographs in galleries, especially Alfred Stieglitz's American Place,
and in the Museum of Modern Art. The Park Avenue apartment
building in which Diane's parents lived had a darkroom for the use of
tenants. The young Arbuses appropriated it.
David Nemerov, who was wondering how his son-in-law intended to
earn a living, happily hired the couple to do advertising shoots for

Russek's. ''We were living, breathing photography at every

moment,'' Allan says. ''This was a way to get paid for it.'' Although he
and Diane admired the photojournalism of Henri Cartier-Bresson,
the heyday of the pictorial newsmagazine was about to fade before
the allure of television, and the excitement -- along with the
opportunity -- was in fashion magazines. The Second World War
delayed until 1946 the debut of their fashion photography studio,
which operated under the joint credit ''Diane & Allan Arbus.'' Diane
came up with the ideas; Allan set up the lights and camera, clicked
the shutter, developed the film and printed the proofs. The business
was a success but unremittingly stressful. ''We never felt satisfied,''
Allan explains. ''There was that awful seesaw. When Diane felt O.K.,
I would be in the dumps, and when I would be exhilarated, she
would be depressed.'' In retrospect, he says he thinks it was a
mistake to demand a concept for each shoot rather than simply
photograph models in front of white no-seam paper, as Avedon did
in Harper's Bazaar to great acclaim. ''I guess we figured if we
photographed the way Dick did, it wouldn't come out,'' he says. ''We
were afraid to try it. I remember one day Dick just popped into the
studio. We were talking back and forth. I said, 'When we started in
this, I thought it would be so easy.' He said, 'Isn't it?'''
In 1951, they closed down the studio and escaped to Europe with
their 6-year-old daughter, Doon. (Their second child, Amy, would be
born three years later.) But the respite lasted only a year. Once
back, it was the same grind for four more years until, one night in
1956, Diane quit. ''I can't do it anymore,'' she told Allan unexpectedly
one evening. Her voice rose an octave. ''I'm not going to do it
anymore.'' Although unprepared, Allan understood. ''At a fashion
sitting, I was the one operating the camera,'' he says. ''I was
directing the models on what to do. And Diane would have to go in
and pin the dress if it wasn't hanging right. It was demeaning to her.
It was a repulsive role.'' At first he was terrified of operating without
her. ''But it came out all right,'' he says. ''In some ways, it was easier
to work, because I didn't have that load of Diane's dissatisfaction to
deal with.''
Soon after Arbus's death, the art director Marvin Israel -- who was
her lover, colleague, critic and goad -- told a television journalist: ''It
could be argued that for Diane the most valuable thing wasn't the
photograph itself, the art object; it was the event, the experience. . . .
The photograph is like her trophy -- it's what she received as the

reward for this adventure.'' Today, when you shuffle through the
lifeless photos by imitators in the Arbus idiom, you are reminded of
how much time Arbus spent with so many of her subjects and of how
fascinated she was by their lives. She invested the energy in them
that a painter like Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon would devote to
repeated portrait sittings; but unlike Freud or Bacon, who chose their
intimates as their subjects, Arbus picked strangers and, through her
infectious empathy, was able to transform these subjects into
intimates. ''She was an emissary from the world of feeling,'' says the
photographer Joel Meyerowitz. ''People opened up to her in an
emotional way, and they yielded their mystery.'' Without
sentimentalizing them or ignoring their failings, she liked and
admired her freaks. She first met Eddie Carmel, the Jewish giant,
almost a decade before she took her extraordinary photograph of
him with his parents. You feel that had she never gotten the picture,
Arbus still would have considered the time with Carmel well spent.
Robert Brown, a neighbor and friend who often breakfasted with the
Arbuses when they lived on East 72nd, recalls a Sunday morning,
probably in 1957, when Allan showed Diane a newspaper item that
he knew would interest her: the circus was coming to town. The
troupe would be debarking from a train early the next morning and
parading to Madison Square Garden. ''Let's go!'' Diane said. Allan
was too busy, but Brown, who is an actor, accompanied her to the
parade and then drove her to Madison Square Garden. Coming to
pick her up three hours later, Brown asked the backstage doorman
where she was. ''Oh, the photographer?'' the man answered. ''She
never got very far.'' He pointed. She was sitting on the floor with the
midgets. ''I don't think she was snapping,'' Brown says. ''She was
getting involved.''
Arbus trawled the city, getting deeply involved with the people who
caught her eye: the sideshow performers at Hubert's Dime Museum
and Flea Circus, the cross-dressers at Club 82, the moonstruck
visionaries with handmade helmets and crackpot theories, the
magicians and fortunetellers and self-proclaimed prophets. But she
also pursued more ''ordinary'' types -- the swimmers at Coney
Island, the strollers down Fifth Avenue, the people on benches in
Central Park. At first, she was shy about getting too close.
Sometimes she would catch her quarry unawares, from a distance,
and then crop the image to give a close-up effect. But she wasn't
happy doing that. ''We were very against cropping,'' Allan says. She

wanted to capture her subjects whole and unaltered, before adding

them to her ''butterfly collection.''
Many of her pictures from the 50's are grainy, in the style of CartierBresson, Robert Frank and other documentary photographers of the
time. ''The reduced tonal scale makes it seem like a copy of a copy,
like an old record that's faded and a lot of the information is gone,''
says John Szarkowski, curator emeritus of photography at the
Museum of Modern Art. ''Which is fine for a certain kind of
description, where you know you're not getting everything.'' In the
late 50's, however, something mysterious transformed Arbus's work.
''I don't think there is any development,'' Szarkowski says. ''It
happened all at once. Basically, it was like St. Paul on the road to
Damascus.'' Allan is more specific: ''That was Lisette. Three
sessions and Diane was a photographer.''
Diane took her first course with Lisette Model in 1956. Earlier she
had studied briefly with Berenice Abbott and Alexey Brodovitch, but
Model had a far greater impact on her artistically and personally.
''Model was able to instill in Arbus a self-confidence of approach and
engagement that really released her,'' says Peter C. Bunnell, curator
emeritus of photography at Princeton University. ''Arbus in her own
personality was rather shy. Not what Lisette was, in a European
tradition, an independent, aggressive woman.'' Model's great
influence on Arbus came through their conversations about the art of
photography. ''After three months, her style was there,'' Model told
the writer Phillip Lopate. ''First only grainy and two-tone. Then
perfection.'' Arbus, shortly before her death, told her own class of
students, ''It was my teacher, Lisette Model, who finally made it clear
to me that the more specific you are, the more general it'll be.''
The Arbuses' professional split was followed in 1959 by a personal
one. Diane and the girls moved to a converted stable in the West
Village. It was a subtle separation. Allan maintained the fashion
photography business under the joint credit. He continued to test
Diane's new cameras and to have his assistants develop her film.
She printed her photos in his darkroom. He managed their joint
finances, and he often came for Sunday breakfast. However, despite
the persistence of their bond, the separation and eventual divorce
forced -- and liberated -- Diane to step out on her own. ''I always felt
that it was our separation that made her a photographer,'' Allan says.
''I couldn't have stood for her going to the places she did. She'd go

to bars on the Bowery and to people's houses. I would have been

horrified.''
Certainly, Diane was traveling far from the white seamless world of
fashion photography. Because so many of her subjects lived on the
fringes of polite society, her pictures provoked a controversy that
has yet to die down. Most people today who are familiar with the
name ''Diane Arbus'' would probably identify her as ''the
photographer of freaks.'' This stereotype insulates them from the
power of the photographs. Portraits of sideshow freaks constitute a
small portion of Arbus's output. On the other hand, it is true that she
adored them. ''There's a quality of legend about freaks,'' she told a
Newsweek reporter. ''Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and
demands that you answer a riddle.'' She said that she would ''much
rather be a fan of freaks than of movie stars, because movie stars
get bored with their fans, and freaks really love for someone to pay
them honest attention.'' But the word ''freak'' is so vague and
charged that it can be misleading. Arbus did not photograph people
who were disfigured by calamity -- fire, toxic poisoning, war. She
was not a photojournalist like W. Eugene Smith. She did not chase
after victims. The pacifist Paul Salstrom once traveled with her to a
motel that his aunt managed near Los Angeles. After the aunt
agreed to be photographed, Salstrom inquired if Arbus would also
like to photograph his uncle, but she declined. ''My uncle had a large
growth on the back of his neck,'' Salstrom explains. ''She said, 'I'm
not going to ask him, because I feel sorry for him.'''
Arbus regarded circus freaks as ''aristocrats'' and female
impersonators as gender-barrier pioneers. To her, there was nothing
pathetic or repulsive about them. One of her most famous pictures is
''A Young Brooklyn Family Going for a Sunday Outing, N.Y.C., 1966.''
With teased black hair and heavily outlined eyebrows, the woman is
made up to look like Elizabeth Taylor, an aspiration that, inevitably,
she has not quite achieved. Her arms are overburdened with a large
pocketbook, a camera in its case, a leopard-patterned coat and a
big baby girl, and although she is looking straight ahead, she seems
preoccupied. Her baby's arms and face are extended forward, as is
the honest, open gaze of her husband. The only off-kilter figure in
this upstanding group is their son, a mentally retarded boy, his eyes,
head and body all askew, his small hand held by his father. Unlike
the mother, the father is grasping onto nothing else but his son,
whose crooked body fills the gap between the parents. As another
photo in ''Revelations'' establishes, Arbus spent some time in this

family's home. She later wrote, ''They were undeniably close in a

painful sort of way.''
Arbus's choice of subject matter was not especially novel. From the
transvestites of Brassai to the circus dwarf of Bruce Davidson, oddlooking and socially transgressive people have always attracted the
attention of photographers. But even when those photographers
took you backstage, you still felt that you were at a performance.
Arbus went home with her subjects, literally and emotionally. That's
why her portraits of a young man in hair curlers or a half-dressed
dwarf in bed retain the power to shock. It's not the subjects that
unnerve us: her photographs of a middle-class woman in pearls or a
pair of twins with headbands can be just as startling. What shocks is
the intimacy. ''I don't like to arrange things,'' she said. ''If I stand in
front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.'' When
she took a picture, she instinctively found the right place to stand.
Her vantage point denied the viewer any protective distance.
Once she parachuted out of fashion photography, Arbus relied on
magazine editors for assignments. Her empathetic curiosity and
undivided focus -- ''whatever the moment presented, she was in it,''
says her friend Mary Sellers -- made her a remarkable reporter. On
a trip Arbus took to Los Angeles in 1964, Robert Brown, who by then
was living there, chauffeured her to Mae West's house on two
successive days. When he picked her up the first night, she was
bubbling with excitement. ''You know what we did most of the time?''
she told him. ''She's got a locked room with models in plaster of all
the men she's had sex with -- of their erections.'' Reminiscing about
her former lovers, West had waxed rhapsodic: ''Each one is
different: the way they sigh, the way they moan, the way they move;
even the feel of them, their flesh is just a little different. . . . There's a
man for every mood.'' Arbus took it all down for the article she would
write. She probably waited until the next day, by which point West
would have been completely charmed and relaxed, to take the visual
record of the septuagenarian sexpot -- in negligee, backlighted by
the merciless Southern California sun. ''Mae West hated the
pictures,'' Allan Arbus recalls. ''Because they were truthful.''
A waiflike figure with huge green eyes, a goofy grin and a girlish
giggle, Arbus would roam the city, laden down with camera
equipment. Her blend of whispery fragility and unstoppable tenacity
was very seductive. ''She had this little squeaky voice, completely

unarming because she was so childlike and her interest so

genuine,'' says the photographer Larry Fink, who observed her
working in New York parks. ''So she would hover there and smile
and be a little embarrassed, with her Mamiyaflex going. She would
wait for people to relax, or to get so tense that they would be the
opposite of relaxed, with much the same effect.'' Sandra Reed, the
albino sword swallower who is the subject of one of Arbus's most
arresting late photographs, recalls Arbus, clad in denim, coming up
to her before the circus opened. ''I thought it was someone wanting
an autograph,'' Reed says. ''She would get a rapport going between
you and her. She asked me how it was to travel around, places I'd
seen, things I'd done. She was very relaxed, a very ordinary person.
She talked to me about the sword-swallowing, how I did it. We
talked for quite some time, an hour, maybe two. She asked me if I
would mind to be in full costume, and I said, 'No problem.''' Reed
performed her act, and Arbus photographed her. The shoot, Reed
thinks, took about 45 minutes.
''People were interested in Diane, just as interested in her as she
was in them,'' Szarkowski says. He first met Arbus late in 1962. He
had recently succeeded Edward Steichen as director of photography
at the Museum of Modern Art, and Arbus was picking up a portfolio
of her work that she had dropped off for review. ''It was an accident,''
he says. ''I came out of my office, so my assistant introduced us
somewhat embarrassedly. I liked her immediately. She was a person
with a very lively intelligence. So the conversation went on, and it
got to the point where she asked what I thought of the work.'' Arbus's
portfolio consisted mostly of portraits of eccentric New Yorkers that
she had done for Harper's Bazaar. Szarkowski remembers telling
her: '''I don't find it quite right. It seems to me the photographs don't
fit what your intention is.'''
They were grainy 35-millimeter pictures, the sort that
photojournalists snapped on the fly. ''Technically, they looked a little
bit like Robert Frank, not quite like Bill Klein,'' Szarkowski says. ''I
said to her, 'It seems to me what you're interested in is much more
permanent, ceremonial, eidetic.''' He then pointed to an anomalous
photograph she had taken with a large Rolleiflex camera that
produces a more finely detailed, square negative. '''That's what
you're looking for; it's like Sander,''' Szarkowski recalls saying to her.
''Maybe it was my North Wisconsin accent. She said, 'Who's
Sander?'''

Perhaps it was his twang, or maybe Arbus was momentarily

distracted, because she certainly was familiar by then with the work
of the great German photographer August Sander. Shrewd as
Szarkowski was to recognize the affinity, Sander had been brought
to her attention two years earlier by Marvin Israel, who would prove
to be the most astute and important champion of Arbus's work.
Israel, like Arbus, was a person who thrived on contradictions. He
was raised in a well-off New York Jewish family (the money came
from a women's-clothing business) but affected a down-at-the-heels
bohemian style. A protege of Alexey Brodovitch, who galvanized
American magazine design with the electric energy of the Bauhaus
and Russian Constructivism, Israel was art director of Seventeen in
the late 50's and then himself became the art director of Brodovitch's
baby, Harper's Bazaar. He worked in a dusty, cluttered three-floor
studio in the cupola of a building on lower Fifth Avenue, amid the
cacophony of birdcalls (a parrot and a caged crow being the loudest)
and the barking of a vicious adopted stray mongrel, named Marvin.
''Shut up, Marvin,'' he would bark back.
In late November 1959, a few months after moving into the West
Village carriage house, Arbus met Israel, and they became lovers.
Their intense friendship and professional collaboration would
continue until the end of her life.
Israel gave Arbus a portfolio of Sander photographs from a 1959
issue of the Swiss magazine Du, seeing immediately that Sander
was the photographer whose ambition and perspicacity most
resembled her own. Sander set himself a monumental task -- ''to
see things as they are and not as they should or might be''; by so
doing, he thought he could provide a ''physiognomic image of an
age.'' In his Teutonic thoroughness and anthropological zeal, Sander
was a creature of his place and time; as an artist, however, he
transcends those categories. Sander was after clarity. He printed on
the shiny smooth paper normally used for technical illustrations, and
he ignored the introduction of panchromatic glass plates that would
obscure blemishes. He typically spent an hour or more talking with
his subject before taking the photograph, and whenever possible, he
scheduled the sitting in the subject's home, not in a studio, to
capture more of the truth.

In the next generation, Bernd and Hilla Becher took up Sander's

typological mania and ran with it. What fascinated Arbus about

Sander was the psychological inquiry, which she adopted and

pushed as far as she could. Arbus photographed many of the same
subjects as Sander (carnival performers, midgets, women in slinky
dresses, blind people, twins). Comparing their work is instructive.
For example, Sander's portrait of fraternal twins, from 1925, shows a
timid, eager-to-please girl and a dour, conventional little boy; you
can see, as in embryo, the roles in society that they are preparing to
play. In contrast, there is nothing sociological about Arbus's 1967
portrait of identical twin girls in Roselle, N.J. Instead, she has taken
a kind of psychological X-ray. The girl on the right smiles angelically
and trustingly. The one on the left is slightly off: her eyes are
misaligned, her mouth is suspiciously pursed, her stockings are
bunched at the knees, even the bobby pins on her white headband
have slipped below her eyes. Wearing identical frocks, the girls are
standing so close that they seem to be joined in one body, two
aspects of the same soul. ''What's left after what one isn't is taken
away is what one is,'' Arbus wrote in a notebook in 1959. That
aphorism could be the caption to this picture.
Marvin Israel said that when he was at Bazaar, he wanted to assign
Arbus to photograph every person in the world. In the early heady
days of their affair, when she was peppering Israel with almost daily
postcards, Arbus once wrote him that ''everyone today looked
remarkable just like out of August Sander pictures, so absolute and
immutable down to the last button, feather, tassel or stripe. All odd
and splendid as freaks and nobody able to see himself, all of us
victims of the especial shape we come in.'' By the time Arbus picked
up a camera, the termite-riddled social order of Sander's day had
crumbled. She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating
their own identities -- cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers,
tattooed men, the nouveau riche, the movie-star fans -- and by those
who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security
or comfort. Arbus's friend Adrian Allen, who began her career as an
assistant to the legendary Brodovitch, recalls going through the
layout of the posthumous monograph that Doon and Israel put
together and seeing with shock the image of a woman she had
known, seated on a park bench. In her three-strand necklace and
helmetlike bouffant hairdo, Arbus's subject seems riven by secret
hopelessness. ''I had never seen this woman look like that before,''
Allen says. ''She was always laughing, smiling, covering up what
was underneath.'' Somehow, like a dowser of despair, Arbus had
picked up the signal of misery. Not long after the picture was taken,
the woman in the bouffant hairdo committed suicide.

Because Arbus took her own life, many people assume that she was
constantly grim. Actually, she was an enthusiastic woman with a
highly honed sense of the absurd, who was afflicted by blasts of
bleakness. ''She was a very lively person,'' Szarkowski says. ''She
had a very vivacious mind. She was never a depressed person in
my presence.'' Allan Arbus, who knew her as well as anyone did,
saw a fuller picture. ''I was intensely aware of these violent changes
of mood,'' he says. ''There were times when it was just awful, and
there were times. . . . '' His expression mimics fizzy exhilaration.
Diane preferred receiving confidences to giving them, one reason
photography was her natural medium. ''She wanted to contend with
something else, not express herself,'' Doon says.
The relationship with Israel was painful for Arbus. Married to Margie
Ponce Israel, a brilliant but emotionally troubled artist, he was not as
reliably available or emotionally supportive as Arbus wished. ''Diane
made no secret of the fact that she was waiting and waiting for
Marvin's attention,'' says Elisabeth Sussman, co-curator of the show
at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who has gone through
Arbus's journals, letters and date books. Arbus did not talk to most of
her friends about Israel. Unusually, the artist Mary Frank knew them
both independently. ''A desire to be cared for is a very human
instinct,'' Frank says. ''Marvin could not have given Diane that
feeling. He was a very complicated person, and interested in his
own powers. He was capable of kindness, but then there was this
explosive aspect.'' Frank says that she saw Arbus despondent a
couple of times, and ''it definitely had to do with Marvin.'' Where
Allan gave Diane technical advice and emotional bolstering, Israel
excited her to take on new projects and challenges. ''He was always
interested in artists pushing as hard as they could toward their own
obsessions or perversities,'' says the writer Lawrence Shainberg,
who was a close friend.
Like Arbus, Israel loved to explore the seamier precincts of New
York. They didn't have to go far. Forty-Second Street was very
different then: ''everyone winking and nudging and raising their
eyebrows and running their hands through their marcelled hair and I
saw one of your seeing blind men and a man like you have told me
about with the pale ruined face-that-isn't-there and a thousand lone
conspirators,'' Arbus wrote Israel. Some of those trophies appeared
publicly when she agreed with much trepidation to be included,
along with Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, in an exhibition,

''New Documents,'' that opened at the Museum of Modern Art in

February 1967. Like the contemporaneous ''New Journalists'' in
Esquire and New York (Arbus worked for both magazines), the
newfangled documentary photographers in this show made the
seeing eye a part of the picture. To her relief, Arbus adored the way
her work looked hanging in the museum galleries. ''I've been here as
many times as I can get here -- I love it,'' she told a reporter.
However, her ambivalence about presenting her photographs as art
objects remained. In March 1969, in Midtown New York, Lee Witkin
opened the first commercially viable gallery devoted to photography.
Arbus agreed to let him display some of her pictures, but she
declined his offer of a large exhibition. Although she accepted offers
to lecture and sold prints to museums, she always voiced her doubts
about whether she was ready for this attention.
In the months after the New Documents show, she bristled with new
ideas. ''She would have 30 projects at once,'' Allan says. But then
she would fall into funks that were harder and harder for her to pull
out of. ''She was in so much pain, and really struggling with what the
meaning of her life was,'' Mary Sellers says. ''I had never felt her to
be as fragile and unsure.''
When the lease came up on the carriage house, Arbus was forced to
move, in January 1968, to a less attractive apartment in the East
Village. She had had a serious bout of hepatitis two years earlier; in
1968, she suffered a relapse. Maybe most unsettling to her was
Allan's decision to move to Los Angeles in June 1969 to pursue an
acting career. ''I guess it was oddly enough the finality of Allan
leaving (for Calif.) that so shook me,'' she wrote to her friend
Carlotta Marshall. ''He had been gone somewhat for a hundred
years but suddenly it was no more pretending. This was it. . . . I am
learning all over again it seems how to live, how to make a living,
how to do what I want and what I don't, all sorts of commonsensical
things I have tended to make a big deal about.'' One of the things
that she had to learn was how to develop film, because Allan was
closing his darkroom. Although she had always made her own
prints, she relied on his assistants for processing film. ''It was hard
for her to take over this part of photography,'' he says. The technical
aspects never appealed to her. ''She was very funny about her
cameras,'' he continues. ''If one didn't work, she would put it aside
and then pick it up the next day to see if it had gotten better.'' Yet
she knew precisely what look she was after, and she would
improvise technically to achieve it. In 1965, she began printing her

negatives with the black border exposed -- as if to emphasize both

that this image was uncropped and thus unaltered, and also
(sabotaging its pretensions to truth) that in the end it was only a
photograph. ''For me the subject of the picture is always more
important than the picture,'' she once said. ''And more complicated.''
In the last two years of her life, she was working on a project that
delighted her deeply. Through a relative of Adrian Allen, she
obtained permission to photograph at institutions for the severely
retarded in New Jersey. These pictures, which Doon posthumously
labeled the ''Untitled'' series, represent a sharp departure from
Arbus's previous work. Combining flash unpredictably with daylight
and catching her subjects on the move, she was relinquishing
control and embracing the accidental. She wrote Allan that the
photographs ''are very blurred and variable, but some are gorgeous.
FINALLY what I've been searching for, and I seem to have
discovered sunlight, late afternoon early winter sunlight. It's just
marvelous. In general I seem to have perverted your brilliant
technique all the way round, bending it over backward you might say
till it's JUST like snapshots but better.'' In her notebook, she devoted
five pages to individual descriptions of her retarded subjects. Writing
to Amy, she explained: ''Some of them are so small that their
shoulder would fit right under my arm and I would pat them and their
head would fall on my chest. They are the strangest combination of
grown-up and child I have ever seen. One lady kept saying over and
over: 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' After a while one of the staff said, 'That's
all right but don't do it again' and she quieted down. . . . I think you'd
like them.''
Adrian Allen went to see the photographs in the Westbeth artisthousing complex in the West Village, which is where Arbus moved
from East 10th Street in January 1970. ''The whole floor was filled
with that project,'' Allen recalls. ''At first I found it kind of awful to look
at these people. Then, as I started to look at the larger prints and
found how the people connected with her -- they were the sort of
people who couldn't connect with anybody, but that quality she had
of getting people to let her in, even if they were mad or retarded -- in
those pictures, I sensed her presence.'' Allen understood that
Arbus's excitement arose from her attachment to her retarded
subjects. ''She loved the photographs because they illustrated the
connection.'' She had devoted so much energy to getting people to
doff their masks. Now, with these mentally impaired people, she
found a transparency of expression. Oddly, in many of her most

famous photographs of them, they are wearing masks for

Halloween.
Sometimes the work would buoy her spirits, but not for long. ''She
was always, always both devoted to and loathing of photography,''
Mary Sellers says. ''She was always wondering not was it good
enough, but was it true enough.''
In many of her late photographs, she returned to her early practice
of capturing people who were unaware of her camera. But the effect
was different now. She was a mature artist, and she could find the
intimacy she wanted in unexpected ways. So that in ''A Woman
Passing, N.Y.C., 1971,'' the determined hunch of the walk, the
proudly chic uplift of the hat and the liver-spotted hand gripping the
pocketbook make us feel we know this woman as well as if we had
read a novel about her. As early as 1967, Diane wrote to Amy: ''I
suddenly realized that when I photograph people I don't anymore
want them to look at me. (I used nearly always to wait for them to
look me in the eye but now it's as if I think I will see them more
clearly if they are not watching me watching them.)''
One of the many misperceptions about Arbus is that her work, in its
emotional toll and immersion in the ''dark side,'' contributed to a fatal
despair. In fact, her work elated her. ''She made it seem like a lark,''
says Michael Flanagan, a friend of hers and Israel's, who worked for
a time as Allan's assistant and developed her negatives. ''The
pictures were sometimes dark and scary, but she was lighthearted,
like it was an adventure for her.'' The doubts and depressions were
triggered by other causes, sometimes by a sense of abandonment,
at times by an internal biological flux she could neither understand
nor control. ''I go up and down a lot,'' she wrote Carlotta Marshall in
late 1968. ''Maybe I've always been like that. Partly what happens
though is I get filled with energy and joy and I begin lots of things or
think about what I want to do and get all breathless with excitement
and then quite suddenly either through tiredness or a
disappointment or something more mysterious the energy vanishes,
leaving me harassed, swamped, distraught, frightened by the very
things I thought I was so eager for! I'm sure this is quite classic.''
She went to visit Allan and his new wife, Mariclare Costello, in Los
Angeles in the fall of 1970. He remembers that once, while driving in
the car, she told him: ''I took a pill before we left and I feel much
better. It's all chemical.''

Marshall saw her several times in mid-July 1971, on a visit to New

York from Holland, where she now lived. At their last get-together,
they stayed up late, talking. ''We talked about suicide and death, but
we talked about everything,'' Marshall says. ''I just didn't pay special
attention to the fact that she brought it up. It wasn't a morbid
discussion.'' On July 26, when Marshall was on a ship heading back
to Europe, Allan was acting in a movie in Santa Fe, Doon was
working on a book in Paris, Amy was attending summer school in
Massachusetts and Israel was weekending with his wife at Avedon's
house on Fire Island, Arbus swallowed a number of barbiturates,
climbed fully dressed into her bathtub and cut her wrists with a razor
blade. Two days later, Israel went to her apartment and found the
body.
Arbus was 48 when she died. In the autopsy report, the Medical
Examiner's Office left this tantalizing observation: ''Diary suggestive
of suicidal intent, taken on July 26th, noted.'' The on-the-scene
medical investigator's report refers to a '''Last Supper' note,'' and
Lawrence Shainberg, one of three friends whom Israel called to wait
with him for the police to arrive, recalls seeing the words ''Last
Supper'' written on a page of her open diary. What could she have
meant? At the Last Supper, Jesus said that the wine and
unleavened bread were his blood and body, containing eternal life -a black-humor analogy for someone slashing her wrists and gulping
fatal tablets. He also said that he would be betrayed by someone
very close to him.
Did Arbus leave other clues in her date book? We don't know. The
diary page for the 26th, and for the two pages following, have been
neatly excised. ''I've stared at that book for I can't say how long,''
says Sussman, the co-curator. That Arbus took secrets with her to
the grave is completely in character. She collected other people's
mysteries and divulged few of her own. ''I never thought that I knew
all her secrets,'' Allan says. (Asked if she knew all of his, he says,
''Probably.'') The diaries, notebooks and letters that are included in
the museum retrospective and in ''Revelations'' enable us to come
closer to seeing Arbus in the way that she saw her subjects -- with
an unexpected, even unsettling, intimacy. Never for a second,
however, do we feel that we have exhausted the mystery.